Never before have we known so much. Never before have we been able to measure so precisely how much remains unknown.
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Science has extraordinarily expanded our knowledge of the universe, life, and ourselves. Yet every answer has opened new questions. We know the laws governing many phenomena without knowing what, ultimately, the reality they describe actually is. We can reconstruct the history of the universe back to its earliest moments without knowing whether it even makes sense to ask what came “before.” We study the brain without having resolved what consciousness is. We use concepts such as cause, time, infinity, chance, and identity without knowing to what extent they belong to reality itself or to our way of representing it.
Learned Ignoramuses begins with this paradox to formulate a Philosophy of Ignorance.
What can we know?
How do we know?
What do we know?
How does what we know change?
Who is the self that knows?
What really exists?
Does it make sense to ask about meaning?
Through these questions, the book reconsiders some of philosophy’s fundamental problems from a different perspective: by asking not only about what we know, but also about what we do not know and what our ignorance can reveal about the limits of knowledge.
To do so, it employs three complementary forms of reflection. Philosophemes formulate philosophical propositions and intuitions; scientiapothegms confront these questions with what contemporary science allows us to affirm; and agnoiologemes attempt to formulate precisely what remains unknown. The purpose is not to confuse science and metaphysics, but precisely to distinguish them: to separate what we can regard as well-supported knowledge from our philosophical interpretations and from hypotheses that we are not yet able to verify.
From this inquiry emerges the central proposition of Learned Ignoramuses: ignorance is not simply the opposite of knowledge. To know also means to discover new limits, formulate new questions, and recognize that a consciousness that forms part of the universe can never contemplate it from outside.
The book ultimately takes this reflection toward a more radical hypothesis. If reality remains open to the emergence of new differences, could ignorance be related not only to the limits of our knowledge, but also to freedom, creativity, and the possibility of genuine novelty?
Learned Ignoramuses engages in dialogue with the philosophical tradition—from Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant to Nietzsche, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Popper, and Heidegger—and with some of the questions raised by physics, cosmology, mathematics, and the life sciences. But it is intended neither as a history of philosophy nor as a work of popular science. Instead, it draws on both to return to a more elementary question:
What can we know about what we do not know?
This is not a book that promises to solve the great mysteries of existence. Its proposal is different: to learn to distinguish more clearly what we know, what we suppose, and what we do not know—and to recognize that perhaps some of our deepest questions need to be examined before we even attempt to answer them.
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